In American writing the highway has an almost mystical significance, epitomised in Jack Kerouac's On the Road and refracted into popular culture through a thousand songs and images. One of Mark Twain's forgotten masterpieces, Roughing It, is a kind of 19th-century road movie. In very different ways, Dylan, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald have all written about heading West.

On the road, the solitary American becomes the star of his own show, singing, in Walt Whitman's words, of his first and best subject: himself. That nomadic solipsism has inspired some of the best American fiction, notably Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and some of the most memorable American journalism, especially almost anything by Tom Wolfe, the all-time 'me' journalist.

Chuck Klosterman, a music journalist and author of a celebrated memoir entitled Fargo Rock City, is the all-American inheritor of these literary legacies. Killing Yourself to Live (Faber £12.99, pp245), a title owed to Black Sabbath and subtitled 85 per cent of a True Story, is the latest rendering of that trans-American dream: the coast-to-coast quest for the meaning of life. 'This,' says our hero in an opening advertisement, 'is a story about love, death, driving, narcissism, America, the ill-advised glamorisation of recreational drug use, not having sex ... If these are not things that interest you, do not read this book.' Who could resist such a prohibition?

Klosterman came to New York City as a young Midwesterner, to write for the hip music magazine Spin, and found himself commissioned to write a monster piece on America's famous rock'n'roll death sites, from Room 100 in the Chelsea Hotel where Sid Vicious expunged Nancy Spungen, to the cornfield in Iowa where Buddy Holly fell to earth. Ostensibly, this little book is Klosterman's riff on that assignment - an often hilarious report on a rambling, inconclusive drive from New York to Seattle, the scene of Kurt Cobain's suicide.

When all's said and done, Klosterman discovers that there's not that much to see. Most of the rock'n'roll death sites are the scenes of plane crashes: Randy Rhoads (Florida); Otis Redding (Madison, Wisconsin); Rick Nelson (Texas); Patsy Cline (Camden, Tennessee). There's only so much you can write about funerary cairns, and Klosterman dramatises where he can. As with any true artist, these limitations become a source of inspiration to our hero. As well as ruminating, often brilliantly, on celebrity death, Klosterman conducts a comic exploration of a dysfunctional sex-life with three girlfriends, Diana, Lenore and Quincy. The last is probably the love of his life, and it is she who makes the observation that explains the strangely compulsive appeal of this odd little book.

'You,' she says, 'you have interesting concerns.' He also has a very likeable, winning tone, a sure comic touch and a singularly wry comic vision. Reaching Seattle he notes that 'there are a lot of dead people here. If rock musicians were 16-ton ivory-bearing pachyderms, Seattle would be America's elephant graveyard ... that could still happen, assuming Elefant lead singer Diego Garcia gets assassinated on top of the space needle.'

The secret of good journalism, as Twain demonstrated, is tone. Get the tone right and the reporting falls into place. Killing Yourself to Live is an exquisite exercise in tonal control, often of Nick Hornby. While its subject may seem foreign to British readers, anyone who loves America and American movies will find something in this book to repay the journey.